We forget that our smartphones are computers. While your iPhone might be way easier to use and seem way less complex on the face of it than desktop PCs of old, you can still encounter some similar performance problems over time.
iPhone Care Pro from Tenorshare is an all-in-one utility for PC or Mac that aims to clean up your iPhone, maintain optimum performance and allow you to manage your files without iTunes. I’ve been testing out the app to see how well it does in these respects.
There’s a keen focus on making your iPhone or iPad speedier and more efficient in iPhone Care Pro. The app can find and remove junk files — app caches, temporary files, cookies and crash logs — in order to free up some space and hopefully improve your device’s performance. There’s a Quick Clean and a Deep Clean feature, the latter delving deeper into call history, messages, and other stuff too. It takes a lot longer to complete but does drudge up more deleteable files.
When I completed my first scan and it returned saying there was no junk at all, I was surprised. I then took a look in the settings and saw that, by default, all of my apps seemed to be being ignored by the scan and I needed to toggle which ones not to ignore. It’s great to have granular control over this when dealing with my data, but it seems like the exact opposite of the way it should be by default. Once I had flipped the switch on most of my apps and scanned again, it returned saying I had around 200MB of space I could clean up, most of it from app caches. Did it speed up my phone? Not noticeably so, but my iPhone 6 wasn't exactly sluggish. It is nice to reclaim some of that space, though.
iPhone Care Pro can also complete a simple backup and restore without the need to use iTunes. If you’re not using iCloud for backups, iPhone Care Pro is a little easier and faster than plugging into iTunes and you can restore your device using any iPhone Care Pro or iTunes backup on your system.
If you’re a jailbreaker, you’ll be happy with some of the technical capabilities of iPhone Care Pro. If your iPhone is stuck in anyway and no longer boots, iPhone Care Pro can help you enter or exit DFU or recovery mode and repair your system OS. There’s also a feature within iPhone Care Pro to remove ads from your apps.
I think the area where iPhone Care Pro is least useful is as an iTunes replacement and file manager. Like other apps of its kind, iPhone Care Pro can manage your iOS device’s files. This includes Contacts, Notes, Calendar, Video, Photos, Music and Safari bookmarks.
But if you use iCloud for syncing this data across devices — like most people do these days — you won’t be able to access it in iPhone Care Pro and the app instructs you to switch to local storage on the device which is not ideal. As for photos and videos, it doesn’t play nicely with iCloud Photo Library in iOS 8.3 either, meaning you can only see the photos that are currently being stored on your device (and not those that appear in your Photos app but are actually in the cloud). It would have been nice to have a fully functional file manager to round out the features of iPhone Care Pro.
iPhone Care Pro certainly has its pros and cons. The overall experience lacks polish — from the confusing UX to the non-retina graphics — but it does work with iOS 8.3 and the newest iOS devices and could get you out of a tight spot or help you speed up your device if it’s proving to be laggy. iPhone Care Pro is available free download from Tenorshare for PC and Mac with some features limited. You can download it and try it out for yourself and complete a quick clean or use it for managing your media for. If you wanted to upgrade for full functionality, a license can be bought from Tenorshare’s webstore.
Check out iPhone Care Pro at Tenorshare’s website to learn more.